It's been a few years since Edward and Death rescued Morpheus from his imprisonment. Time moved on its own pace. Due to Edward's intereference and his Order's meticulous efforts, World War 1 never happened in this timeline.
But supressing the negative factors didn't mean they didn't exist. Like always, conflict had a found it's way through human greed.
The world was restless. It had been more than centuries since the last great war shook the continents, yet the storm that now gathered was unlike anything mankind had faced before. Edward's interference in history had left scars and blessings in equal measure. By 1938, those choices had grown into roots that shaped nations, cultures, and ambitions, and now those ambitions were colliding.
There had been no World War I. No trenches soaked with blood across France, no hollowed-out generation shattered by gas and steel. The nations of Europe had not bled themselves white in a conflict without purpose. They were still strong, still arrogant, and still eager for glory. But it also meant they lacked the bitter lesson that once slowed them. They had never tasted the horror of industrialized slaughter. They did not know how easily a continent could destroy itself.
The empires of Britain and France remained, though weakened by age and rebellion. Without the First World War, they never learned humility. They still thought themselves unshakable. Their colonial possessions across the world were fracturing under the weight of Edward's blessing. Nation of Eternia had flourished in fertile lands, while the lands for exiles and criminals—spawned raiders and warlords who clashed against imperial lines. Many became pirates and roamed the mediterrean. London and Paris could no longer dismiss these people as subjects. They held powers now.
Germany had never been broken by the Treaty of Versailles. There was no Weimar collapse, no humiliation for a bitter demagogue to exploit. Instead, Germany stood as an industrial titan, still scarred by ambition, still yearning for dominance. Without the memory of trenches, the generals in Berlin prepared for war with clear eyes and steady hands, their weapons factories humming with efficiency.
Russia had fractured in another way. The Bolshevik Revolution never reached the same level as history. But their impact flapped the buttefly's wings. Instead, from the frozen wastes rose a new northern power—Moskva. Forged in cold and steel, it grew into a state of disciplined soldiers and hard-eyed magi. Its existence split the Russian lands into two—an eastern militarized stronghold in Moskva and the more traditional Tsarist remnants in the west. Both glared at each other, but both also looked outward, toward Europe and Asia, waiting for their chance.
In the far north, Vonarland thrived. Once the barren ice of Greenland and Canada's northern reaches, it had been remade by Edward into fertile lands where the old Norse spirit endured. By 1938, Vonarland's fleets cut across the North Atlantic, its ships powered by both modern engines and ancient runes. They were neither allies nor enemies of Europe, but their presence turned the Atlantic into contested water long before war began.
Japan remained dangerous, though its path was altered. The samurai spirit had survived the modern age, tempered but never erased. Their armies carried rifles and tanks, but every officer bore a sword, and their codes of honor shaped every campaign. The atrocities that had once scarred Asia—the Rape of Nanking, the endless slaughter—did not occur here. Edward's hand had checked that cruelty, but it had not stripped away ambition. Japan still sought dominance in the Pacific. They marched into China not with reckless savagery, but with cold precision, demanding submission in duels as much as battles.
China itself was not the fractured ruin of another world. The Mongol invasions, once a tide that drowned cities, had been stopped at its northern borders centuries earlier. The Middle Kingdom remained wounded but alive, proud and resistant. Its warlords clashed, its people suffered, but its spirit was not broken. By 1938, China was a wall against Japan, and the battles between them echoed across Asia.
Europe had its own ghosts. The Greek world had never fallen into its Dark Age. Athens and Sparta never turned their strength against one another. The Persians had been stopped before their wars could truly begin. That unbroken legacy shaped Europe for centuries, binding the continent more tightly to a shared heritage. Rome had still risen and fallen, but always against a stronger Greek foundation.
By the 20th century, European culture was not only Roman in its laws and structure but deeply Greek in its ideals. Politicians invoked not just Caesar but Solon and Pericles. Philosophers still quoted Socrates. Armies still studied the Spartans. Even in 1938, that unity mattered. It gave Europe a sense of common destiny—even as its nations prepared to tear each other apart.
Religion had not carved as deep a scar. There had been only one Crusade, centuries earlier. It ended in compromise, Jerusalem shared by guardians of many faiths, neutral by Edward's decree. That peace held. By 1938, religion was still powerful, but it did not dominate foreign policy. The coming war would not be waged for faith, but for land, for power, for dominance.
And through all of this, magic was no secret. The world had grown up knowing it existed. The people did not flinch at sorcery, nor cry "witchcraft" at miracles. Every major nation had its own circle of magi. Armies trained not only with rifles and artillery, but with wards, sigils, and counterspells. Governments studied old relics with the same hunger as they studied engines and bombs. In this world, the Second Great War would not be fought with steel alone, but with spells and artifacts as real as any tank or plane.
The storm gathered in silence.
Germany armed itself, unbroken and ambitious. The formation of the Nazi party under Hitler started putting their plans into motion. Britain and France held their empires too tightly, blind to the uprisings within Eternia. Moskva built fortresses in its frozen lands, waiting for the moment to strike east or west. Vonarland's fleets patrolled the Atlantic, disrupting trade and testing resolve. Japan pressed harder into China, while China stood unyielding.
And because there had been no First World War, no bitter lesson of trenches and gas, none of them truly understood the scale of the fire they were about to unleash.
By 1938, the stage was set. The Second Great War loomed—not as a repeat of the old, but as something far stranger and more dangerous. A war of nations and ideologies, of armies and sorcerers, of machines and myths.
The world Edward had reshaped was about to be tested.
****
The world slid from tense silence into open war in the fall of 1939. The maps looked somewhat familiar to anyone who studied Europe, but the rules beneath them were different. Edward's hand had cut and rerouted history centuries earlier, and those changes now set the terms of the conflict.
Europe, blind to the lessons of another history, walked willingly into the fire. Germany, unshackled by Versailles, moved with precision and force. Its factories had never slowed, its armies never humbled, and now its ambitions could no longer be contained.
September 1, 1939. Dawn.
Columns of German armor crossed the Polish frontier while sorcerers marked the air with runes of concealment and force. Engineers followed with wards scribed on the chassis of Panzers, lines of power humming low beneath the engine noise. Recon aircraft swept forward under weather veils, cloud and shadow bent to hide their approach.
Polish officers responded fast. Their own magi lit counter-sigils over bridges and railheads, raised earth-ramparts in hours, and called local spirits to slow the advance. It wasn't enough. Germany had trained for this for years, combining radio, motorized infantry, and regimented spellwork into a single tempo. Where a Polish barrier rose, German counter-glyphs cracked it. Where cavalry charged, antitank guns spoke, and the cavalry's protective charms failed against piercing scripts that ate through layered wards.
Weeks, not months. By the end of September, the Polish command structure folded. From the east, Moskva moved with calculated speed, its field marshals calling it a "security operation." Their magi were severe and methodical, cloaking divisions in auroral curtains that confused enemy scouts. Poland was partitioned—west to Berlin's administration, east to Moskva's iron bureaucracy.
In London and Paris, declarations of war followed as expected. What didn't follow was readiness. Without the trauma of a previous world war, neither government had treated mobilization as a reflex. They had magi on payrolls and factories ready to pivot, but their doctrine lagged behind Germany's drilled integration of engine, ether, and infantry.
***
Britain and France declared war, their voices echoing across Europe. But their empires were not ready for the storm. They had not rebuilt for decades after a world war, because there had been no such war. Their armies were still thinking in old terms, their magi not mobilized in time. While they gathered, Germany consolidated, its eyes already fixed on the next conquest.
In another world, France had dug trenches, built the Maginot Line, and remembered the slaughter of 1914. Here, without that memory, their defenses were brittle.
Winter settled. The Western Front stayed quiet on the surface, skirmishes and reconnaissance flights the only noise. France placed its faith in fixed defenses, fortresses woven with old wards designed to lock the frontier. They were impressive on paper: layered stone, reinforced by sigils bound into the foundations. But they were built to stop a frontal assault.
In May 1940, Germany went around them.
Through the Ardennes moved armor columns under silence rites and speed blessings, supported by assault engineers carrying compact rune-kits to collapse roadblocks and neutralize trip-wards. French units fought hard when they found the Germans, but command lines tangled. Orders lagged behind reality. In two weeks the front burst. By June, Paris had fallen. Government ministers fled south, some trying to rally, some simply running.
British officers met in tight rooms in Whitehall with maps spread and sigil-lamps burning low. An admiral tapped the Channel with a pen.
"We hold this. At any cost."
A young attaché from the druidic corps nodded. "At any cost," she said, voice firm, placing three stones on the map in a line from Dover to Portsmouth—liths keyed to weather and sight. "No army will cross if the sea won't let them."
Germany turned its eyes across the Channel. The Luftwaffe rose, armed not only with bombs but with storms conjured by their weather-magi, seeking to blacken Britain's skies. The Royal Air Force fought back, its pilots carrying protective charms and flying alongside griffins drawn from Britain's old druidic lines.
The Battle for Britain began in the air. The Luftwaffe flew with storm-scribes in their crews, carried talismans to blind searchlights, and dropped canisters that cracked protective nets with nullifying pulses. The RAF answered with pilots who wore charms against vertigo and fear, gliding under sky-wards cast from chalk downs and ancient groves. Sirens wailed. Fire brigades ran. Wardens—mundane and arcane—worked side by side on rooftops and in tunnels.
London burned in places, but it breathed. German planners sketched invasion tides and then set them aside, unwilling to gamble on a crossing under Britain's coastal hexes and the Royal Navy's guns. The Channel stayed hostile—not only to ships, but to predictive scrying and long-range curses. Britain had few advantages left, but the island itself was one.
***
While Europe burned, Asia erupted.
In Asia, Japan advanced with cold, disciplined force. Officers wore swords by regulation. Duels between commanders sometimes settled the timing of a withdrawal or the fate of a city gate, but artillery and logistics still decided campaigns. Japanese military magi favored precision—binding rites to improve engine performance, warding rituals to reduce shrapnel lethality, compact counter-hexes to collapse enemy scrying.
China refused to break. The Mongol conquest had never crashed through its heartland in this timeline. Northern bastions stood on ground that remembered centuries of resistance. Factionalism remained, but regional armies had modern artillery and their own sorcerers. They traded space for time, pulled industry inland, built field-wards tied to geography rather than fragile talismans that could be plucked. Cities fell; the country did not.
Japan advanced deeper into China in 1939, its armies moving with the precision of soldiers raised under the samurai code. Battles were fought not only with rifles and artillery but in duels between generals, where swords flashed and spells struck like lightning. Cities fell, but Japan did not repeat the massacres of another history. Their conquests were harsh, but controlled. To them, war was an extension of honor, not savagery.
Tokyo's war cabinet debated a wider strike into the Pacific. The admirals argued for securing resource chains from island to island, building a shield before any Western power—Britain or the United States—cut Japan off. The generals cautioned against waking giants. In 1940, they pushed out anyway, seizing islands with rapid amphibious drills and disciplined restraint. Wherever Japanese troops landed, civil order followed strict codes rather than carnage. It didn't make the occupation welcome. It made it efficient.
Still, their ambitions stretched further. By end of 1940, Japan had turned its gaze toward the Pacific, clashing with colonial garrisons and seizing islands. Their navy, infused with enchanted steel and bound spirits, became a force that threatened even Britain's fleets. The United States, though distant, began to watch carefully.
***
In another world, armies would have fought across deserts for Suez and oil. Here, Eternia blocked that path completely.
There had been no colonization of Eternia. Not ever. When the Church called the so called "Second Crusade" to subjugate the continent and seize its riches, three hundred thousand crusaders marched, carrying banners and relics.
But then a single man descended. The army vanished—no battlefield, no prisoners, no graves. The ground where their camps had stood returned to plain earth. Word spread. Since then, every foreign government learned the rule: you do not invade Eternia, you do not "civilize" it, you do not trespass.
In 1939–1940, as Europe burned, Eternia watched. Kings and councils across its blessed lands sent messengers to their neighbors on the rim, reaffirming the old pledge: no outsider armies on Eternian soil, no bases, no "advisors." The continent kept trade narrow and formal, with contracts bound by oathstones that broke if terms were breached. Ships that drifted too close to forbidden shores turned back with their captains swearing the horizon itself moved to block them.
Diplomats in Berlin, Rome, London, and Paris understood. There would be no desert gambit, no way to turn south and find easy victory. The war would not be decided on Eternian ground. Europe had to solve Europe. Eternia would not interfere unless someone attacked them.
A British official summed it up in a secure memorandum: "Eternia is a wall. We do not test it."
***
While Germany struck Europe and Japan surged across Asia, the North Atlantic became a new battlefield.
North America looked different. Vonarland stretched from Greenland's ice-edge to the Pacific, all the lands once called Canada joined to the reworked Greenland as a single northern realm. Longhouse halls stood beside modern parliaments. The Thing convened under electric light and aurora. Runes marked harbor breakwaters, and shipyards hammered out ice-hardened keels.
To the south, the United States watched the longest border on Earth with careful eyes. The two powers traded, argued over customs, and drilled along opposite banks of rivers that cut from prairie to sea. There were no shots, only watchfulness.
Vonarland declared neutrality at first. But their fleets patrolled aggressively, disrupting shipping lanes, raiding convoys that trespassed into their claimed waters. German U-boats were not the only threat; Vonarland's longships, now ironclad and rune-etched, prowled the seas with a ferocity that echoed their Viking ancestors.
When war returned to Europe, both Washington and the Thing announced neutrality. But "neutral" in Vonarland had edges. The North Atlantic ran through their sphere. They issued a Navigation Edict: any belligerent submarine entering the Greenland-Iceland-Norway gap would be hunted; any surface fleet shadowing convoys near Vonarland waters would be turned away or interned; air routes over the pole would be monitored and, if necessary, sealed with sky-wards.
A British mission arrived in winter 1939. In Nuuk's Council Hall—timber beams carved with knots, electric heaters humming—a British admiral sat across from a Vonarland law-speaker.
"We need the North Road," the admiral said. "Convoys under your protection. We can pay in gold or machines."
The law-speaker folded her hands. "We will not be pulled into your war. We will keep our lanes clean. Ships that sail with our beacon will not carry weapons in our zone. If they do, their lights go dark and we turn them back."
"U-boats?"
"If they hunt near our ice, we take them. If they stay away, we leave them to your hunters."
It was not the alliance London wanted. It was the corridor London needed. By spring 1940, "Snowgate" convoys—merchantmen under Vonarland beacon-lights—moved north of usual tracks, threading fog and pack ice with rune buoys marking safe passes. German U-boats probed the edges and vanished when they crept too far, their crews later claiming they heard singing under the hull just before the gauges failed.
In Washington, senators argued. Some wanted to demand more from Vonarland, citing the shared continent. Others warned against provoking a neighbor whose fleets moved under both diesel and charm. In the end, the United States strengthened border garrisons, expanded shipbuilding, and kept its powder dry. Europe could burn. The Pacific could smolder. The border came first.
Neither Axis nor Allies could ignore them. By 1940, Vonarland became the wild card of the Atlantic—a power that could tip supply lines and decide whether Britain endured or starved.
***
While Germany conquered and Japan expanded, Moskva bided its time. Its armies had marched into Poland's east in 1939, claiming territory with the excuse of "protection." But unlike the old Soviet Union, Moskva was not communist. It was a state built on discipline and militarism, its magi and generals united under a strict hierarchy.
Moskva expanded in shadow, not spectacle. After absorbing Poland's east, its attention turned to the Baltic coast. Campaigns were quick: announcements, deployments, signatures obtained under pressure, and garrisons planted. In the north, new rail lines crept through taiga to deep-water ports. In the capital, the High Collegium of Magi approved budgets for "winter masks"—broad-area cold glamours designed to degrade any enemy's surveillance as soon as snow fell.
German generals took note. "They are not the Soviets from our war games," one wrote. "They do not waste men. They waste time on us instead."
Neither side trusted the other. Both prepared.
In 1940, Moskva turned its attention to the Baltics, absorbing them with swift campaigns. Their presence loomed on Germany's eastern border, an iron shadow waiting. Both powers eyed each other with suspicion, knowing war between them was inevitable.
****
The absence of a North African theater changed force flows everywhere else. Italian planners, denied the fantasy of desert marches, found themselves boxed in by geography. The Mediterranean turned into a duel of fleets and island garrisons, not a platform for a continental drive. German strategists, cut off from any idea of taking oil and prestige by pushing south, looked east sooner. Supply memos in Berlin filled with the same words: Caucasus, Balkans, access.
London understood the flip side. With no Egyptian front to drain men and ships, Britain could focus on the Home Isles, the Atlantic, and aid to allies who still stood. Aid routes now bent north under Vonarland oversight or far south around capes that did not touch Eternian waters. Every convoy that made it through kept the island breathing.
1940 ended with the tension at all time high.
By winter's edge, the war's first phase was set:
Germany held continental Europe west of Moskva's acquisitions, its armies blooded and confident, its industry working in rhythm with state sorcery. It could not cross the Channel, and it could not risk Eternia. It looked east and southeast for its next move.
Britain endured. Bombed but unbroken, it rebuilt fighters faster, hardened coastal wards, and leaned on the "Snowgate" convoys that passed under northern lights.
France lay occupied, resistance networks forming in its countryside with help from old druidic circles and new radio sets. Collaboration and defiance coexisted in the same towns.
Moskva tightened its ring in the northeast, drilling winter offensives in forests under auroral skies. Its generals measured Germany in miles and seasons, not speeches.
Japan controlled key Chinese corridors and a chain of islands, its navy stretched but disciplined. Its leaders watched the United States and weighed the cost of pushing too far, too fast.
The United States rearmed, fortified its long border with Vonarland, and watched both oceans. Public speeches struck careful notes—condemning aggression abroad, promising defense at home.
Vonarland kept the North Road open on its terms. Its patrols turned back prowlers, its courts interned captured submariners with strange leniency, and its Thing debated whether neutrality in a world war was strength or drift.
Eternia stood apart. Its cities prospered behind oaths and boundaries no one dared test. Its councils issued one public statement in late 1940: "We will not admit armies, flags, or missions. We will trade by law and leave you to your quarrels." No one argued. No one wanted to be the cautionary tale that followed.
Snow fell across much of the northern world that December. In bunkers and map rooms, men traced lines they hoped to move in spring. In workshops and shrines, workers bolted armor and inscribed sigils with the same careful hands. Radios whispered. Couriers ran. The war did not sleep. It only paused to breathe.
The Second Great War had begun without the deserts, without the old colonial entanglements in Eternia, and without the bloody memory of trenches to restrain its opening blows. What came next would be decided by winter's math: who learned faster, who supplied better, who understood that in this world engines and enchantments were just two halves of the same weapon.
Spring would test them.
*****
The world burned again, though not as it once had. Edward stood at the edge of it all, eyes that had seen ages watching soldiers march, magi weave their wards, and cities tremble under fire.
The Order of Light met in secret chambers hidden under sanctums of stone and spell. They had whispered the same proposal for weeks: cut off the heads of the beast. Kill the leaders, end the war before it could spread further.
Edward refused.
"Humanity will always find conflict," he said, his voice carrying the weight of centuries. "We have kept them contained for too long. If not these men, then others would rise in their place. The war is not in their leaders—it is in their hearts. Those who do not understand true pain can never understand true peace."
The Order fell silent. Their great mentor did not speak in cruelty, but with a hard truth none could deny.
It was Tesla who rose, his hair silvered but his body still vigorous thanks to Edward's blessing. His voice cracked with both age and fire.
"I understand your reasoning, mentor. But is this not against all we have worked for? Have we not guided humanity to build, to hope, to reach higher? And now we let them tear it all down?"
Edward turned his gaze on him. "Do you remember your past, Nikola? Do you remember when your home burned and your heart was ashes? I trusted you then, because despair had carved your vision sharp. And I told you a truth you should not forget: Kindness, love, loyalty, mercy, respect, and compassion are treasures. They are not infinite. Spent carelessly, they run dry."
Tesla bowed his head, his hands trembling. "I remember," he whispered.
But then his eyes lifted, fierce and glistening. "And I also remember what you said next: The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful than a thousand heads bowing in prayer." His voice broke, and he sank to his knees before his mentor. "You have shown kindness without limit. You have been humanity's salvation even when we did not deserve it. Show us again, Great Mentor. Show us that kindness is not weakness. Please."
The Order looked on—hesitant, waiting, torn between fear and hope.
Edward's face tightened with pain. Slowly, he reached down, lifting Tesla from the floor. His sigh was heavy as mountains.
"Very well," he said at last. "Seek out ways to halt this madness. But do not think it will be undone in a single stroke. Peace cannot be switched on like a lantern. It must be forced into men's bones through years of trial. Still—do what you can."
The Order bowed in unison, voices steady: "Your will is our command. For the salvation of humanity!"
Edward turned away, already thinking of the rulers who still bent the knee to him. Eternia, who worshipped him as a god and held weapons forged from myth that rivaled atomic fire. Vonarland, whose longhouses and halls answered his summons without question. Moskva, severe but loyal, its generals knowing he had stayed their fall centuries earlier. And Greece, still a beacon of old wisdom, where philosophers and magi alike traced their lines back to his hand.
Those nations alone could tilt the balance of the war. He ruled them in all but name. He would need them now.
And still his mind returned to the memory that never left him: the blinding fire that had ended his world. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The mushroom clouds that tore the sky and cursed the soil. The bombs that shattered everything. And how less than 100 years later, humanity ended themselves with the same weapons.
The scientists of this world had not yet reached that brink, but he felt the first sparks since few years ago. Magic guiding them into breakthroughs. Projects whispered in laboratories, state funds bent toward forces they did not understand. He would not let the flame rise again.
"Not this time," Edward murmured to the night. "This time, I will stop it. This time, let there a be a story... with a happy ending."
And with that vow, he stepped into the shadow of war, no longer just its watcher, but the hand that might steer its end.
****
I hope you read the changes and how they have altered the timeline and war. It's pretty difficult to simulate everything without writing a damn thesis on each part. But nobody wants a history lesson here. So I've kept it short as possible.
Btw, keep them votes coming. There's still more than 400 stones remain to unlock the 7th chapter.
*Checks fridge*
"Oh my, we are almost out of milk it seems..... Maybe I should go buy some....."
(#･∀･)